Understanding our total energy usage is really quite simple. The first thing to do is to get hold of your electricity bills.
If you are a Guernsey Electricity customer you can sign up online and you can then download your bills in PDF format. Or you can call them up and ask them to send you a copy.
I then plotted this in excel to show how much power we use annually and by season. It is important to see how your energy profile changes between the seasons.
On average since 2004 we have used per quarter:
Q1 – 1980KW’s
Q2 – 1403KW’s
Q3 – 1451KW’s
Q4 – 1727KW’s
Totals for the years are:
2004 – 6573 KW’s
2005 – 7025 KW’s
2006 – 6745 KW’s
2007 – 5497 KW’s
2008 – 5662 KW’s
2009 – 6060 KW’s
We are expecting to see a jump in the power used from now on as we have decommissioned a gas cooker and heating system so we will use more electricity but this is offset by the lack of gas usage.
What is also worthwhile noting is the difference in amount of power used on your high and low rate tariff’s. Ideally you want to have both as low as possible but you should try to get the High rate consumption below your Low rate of consumption. We have only achieved this on 8 out of the 24 quarters we have on record so far and not recently wither. I’ll write an article on this at a later date.
The next step is to understand where this power usage comes from.